When Strangers come to Church
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| Eigenheim Mennonite, ca. 1950 |
The article on which our Adult Sunday School focused, and which was first printed in the Canadian Mennonite, was logically questionable. It posed the argument that our “traditional” churches put up barriers to entry by members of other cultures, and that that explains the lack of cultural diversity in our pews. That might be a factor in some cases, but the explanation for a lack of cross-cultural presence in Mennonite churches is way more complicated than that.
People who visit our churches—whether they’re culturally different
or not—come again if their experience was satisfying; they don’t if it wasn’t.
That choice likely depends more on their own expectations than it does on the
welcome they receive. The churches with which I’m familiar go out of their way
to greet and engage with strangers, but to even suggest that altering the style
and content of worship so that others have their expectations met—and so they
will return—would simply be at cost of the existing membership, who also have
keen expectations.
The class talked long enough to conclude that the crux of
the matter had to do with style more than with substance. Singing either in
four-part harmony or in unison was a case in point. Granted, a group of
refugees coming to Canada from a church background where hymn singing was
always in unison might feel intimidated by the hymnbooks being used, but if
that would prevent them from worshiping with our established congregation, would
throwing out the hymnbooks and distributing only the words be a reasonable
accommodation? There is no prohibition against singing the melody line for
anyone who wishes it just as there isn’t a prohibition against singing off key;
some consideration could surely be given to help newcomers feel comfortable in
that area without throwing out harmonic artistry in worship. (A side note: four-part
singing allows worshipers to participate at the level of their God-given vocal
range.)
Be glad there's one place in the
world where everybody knows your name,
And they're always glad you came.
You wanna go where people know [that]
People are all the same;
You wanna go where everybody knows your name.
The reason your other-culture visitors never came back after
it was going so well in the foyer is obvious: they want a church with a
familiar style, something established congregations can’t give them without denying
their own members the same human need to “go where everybody knows your name”
on Sunday mornings.
What if a group of refugees from Namibia moved into Rosthern.
On whom would the onus be for their adapting to the food available at the
grocery store? No grocer would redo the store to fit their expectations, but an
astute business person would find out from them what particular items they’d
like to see stocked. They, in turn, would eat in available restaurants, by
invitation in our homes, lunches in English classes and would acclimatize,
gradually. Active churches are, and have been, exceptionally involved in
smoothing transitions for newcomers; hospitality to strangers is in their
mandate. What we need to avoid is measuring our success by the number of
strangers who eagerly line up to join our membership roll.
As Kanadier or Russländer Mennonites, our
history should inform us that in our moves from the Netherlands to Prussia to
Russia and then to Canada, our first priority historically has generally been
to be allowed to live in an exclusive ghetto or colony. Expats from the USA and
Canada to Mexico tend to group into English-speaking communities. I know from
experience how incomprehensibly taxing and tiring it can be to live those first
few months or years in a country whose language and customs are not yours. Fleeing
to a place “where everybody knows your name” becomes a survival tactic, and for
some, the transition never happens because the escape to ghettos can feel like
salvation, but often ends up being a cage.
In 1988, Agnes and I helped the Hungarian Fehervari family
get a visa to Canada from Germany, sponsored by our then home church of
Thompson United Mennonite. They were given a furnished apartment there but
immediately became reclusive, not sending their son to school because it had no
windows, not communicating with their benefactors although the dad had a
reasonable command of English. One morning they were found to have packed and left. They turned up in
Toronto, in the Hungarian community there where we lost track of them, as was
undoubtedly their preference at the time.
I appreciated a line in Joan Thomas’ Five Wives, the story of the massacre of five evangelical missionaries by Waoranis in Ecuador’s back country in the 1950s: “Other cultures are not failed attempts at being you.” (p. 386) One misapprehension we need to shed is that persons of other cultures should be grateful to us for our generosity and our modeling of “better” ways to live. That their gratitude should immediately embrace our faith styles and practices too would be asking a bit much.
The other important misunderstanding to shed is that following
Christ erases cultural distinctions: it does and it doesn’t. If it did, there’d
be far fewer denominations. The German-speaking Russian Mennonites patriated by
Germany in the 1980s didn’t bolster the numbers of Mennonites in the established
churches; they started their own congregations, styled on what they’d longed for in the fifty or so years of their exile. My Umsiedler friend
said to me, “We can’t win. Where we came from we were those damned Germans; now
that we’re in Germany, we’re those damned Russians!”
There are two timelines for changing one’s traditional culture to something really different: zero to never, and zero to a-long-time. To be hospitable even while newcomers are in the early stage of finding “a [new] place where everybody knows your name” is vital, whether or not they want a church where they can express themselves in the manner to which they've been accustomed.
This is by no means an argument against change. In it's formative stages, EMC was a
church whose worship practices replicated as closely as possible what its
members were used to in the old country. Today, the hymns and scriptures on a
screen, everything in English, women in leadership, less formality in worship
services, any one of these developments would have shocked its earliest members.
Big changes, gradually and graciously introduced and nurtured must and will
happen. Just like you can’t hurry a cake by doubling the oven temperature … well,
you get the point.
And, of course, if church is exclusively whatever happens between 10:00 and 12:00 on a Sunday morning, it’s not hard to imagine that newcomers, even our young adults, would choose to be a part of it or not in much the same way as they would choose to go to a movie …
... or not.
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